‘Revolutionary’ Company Has CIA BIOWEAPONS LAB Written All Over It

Theranos Board Of Directors A Dead Giveaway

Just who is Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes?

SOTN Editor’s Note:First, let’s take a close look at the Theranos Board of Directors.How’s that for a Who’s Who of political and military heavyweights?! For a LAB Company?!
To perform laboratory tests in Third World countries for precisely what purpose?

The Very Creepy, Kissinger Connected, TheranosWhy, pray tell, is a Lab Company being overseen by individuals who ought to constitute the board for Northrop Grumman or BAE Systems, two of the world’s largest defense contractors in the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC)?

Truly, ever since Theranos crashed and burned this week much has come out which indicates this company is a quintessential MIC corporation that was specifically set up by The Company, also known as the CIA.

Everything about Theranos smacks of a HUGE CIA black operation in the making beginning with the founding ‘female’ CEO.

Taking a close look at her pedigree it becomes even clearer that Holmes is the product of a typical CIA upbringing. As follows:

Holmes was born in February 1984 in Washington, D.C. Her father, Christian Holmes IV, worked in the United States, Africa, and China as part of government agencies such as USAID.[1] Her mother, Noel Anne,[3] worked as a Congressional committee staffer. She has a brother, Christian Holmes V, who is the director of product management at Theranos. One of her ancestors was a founder of the Fleischmann’s Yeast company.[4]

Her parents’ work in disaster relief encouraged Elizabeth to pursue science and service early on.[5] When she was nine years old, Elizabeth wrote in a letter to her father saying, “What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn’t know was possible to do.”[6]When Holmes was 9, her family moved to Houston and then China, where she claims to have started a business selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities.[4][7]

At first, Elizabeth was drawn to a career in medicine, but needles and the sight of blood repelled her. She decided to find another way to channel her interest in science.[8]. After graduating from St. John’s School in Houston in 2002, Holmes enrolled at Stanford Universityto study chemical engineering, but she left Stanford prior to completing her undergraduate degree.[9]
(Source: Elizabeth Holmes)

How’s that for all the right tickets punched? What a picture-perfect resume for a deep cover CIA contractor!

Which begs the asking of the $64,000 question. What in the world is Theranos really all about? What are they planning on doing with everyone’s blood?!

FYI, “theran”, the etymological root of the Greek word “Theranos” means TO HUNT. “Ther” means animal or beast in Greek. So the question remains, exactly what kind of beast is this upstart company hunting?

Actually, the real $64,000 question here is why did the CIA crash and burn its own company? Now that would make a great Tom Clancy thriller.

State of the Nation
April 14, 2016N.B. As usual, Zero Hedge does a great job of filling in a lot of blanks as posted below.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It seems billion dollar baby of Silcon Valley, Elizabeth Holmes, is facing yet another unicorn-slaying moment as the fairy-take ending for Stanford drop-out looks increasingly distant after WSJ reports regulators are seeking ban the so-called “billionaire” from the blood-tsting business for two years after U.S. health inspectors have found serious deficiencies at Theranos Inc.’s laboratory in Northern California.

In a letter dated March 18, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it plans to revoke the California lab’s federal license and prohibit its owners, including Ms. Holmes and Theranos’s president, Sunny Balwani, from owning or running any other lab for at least two years.

That would include the company’s only other lab, located in Arizona.The two labs generate most of Theranos’s revenue and are at the core of its strategy to revolutionize the blood-testing industry with new technology, user-friendliness and quick results.

The letter hasn’t been released to the public, but a copy was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Holmes has 10 days to try to clear her name:“under federal law, Theranos had 10 days to give CMS evidence of why the sanctions shouldn’t be imposed. The company has responded, and CMS is reviewing the response, according to a person familiar with the matter. If the company doesn’t respond to the satisfaction of the regulators, CMS said in the letter that it will proceed to impose the sanctions.” And if sanctions are imposed, it’s pretty much game over.

If the sanctions are imposed, some would take effect within eight days. Others would take longer, including revoking the California lab’s license, which could occur in 60 days.

Theranos could appeal to an administrative law judge and then a departmental appeals board, which could delay the effective date of some of the sanctions. If Theranos were to appeal, the lab would keep its license pending the outcome of the appeals process. The proposed ban on Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani would take effect at the same time as the lab’s license revocation and would be subject to the same appeals process.

The appeals process could take months, and such appeals have rarely succeeded in the past. A list of appeals decisions on the agency’s website shows that the agency didn’t lose a single such case from 2001 to the end of 2010.

None of this should be a huge surprise, after Aswath Damodaran chastened just a few months ago, looking back at the build up and the let down on the Theranos story, the recurring question that comes up is how the smart people that funded, promoted and wrote about this company never stopped and looked beyond the claim of “30 tests from one drop of blood” that seemed to be the mantra for the company. While we may never know the answer to the question, Aswath Damodaran offers three possible reasons that should operate as red flags on future young company narratives…

1. The Runaway Story: If Aaron Sorkin were writing a movie about a young start up, it would be almost impossible for him to come up with one as gripping as the Theranos story: a nineteen-year old woman (that already makes it different from the typical start up founder), drops out of Stanford (the new Harvard) and disrupts a business that makes us go through a health ritual that we all dislike.

Who amongst us has not sat for hours at a lab for a blood test, subjected ourselves to multiple syringe shots as the technician draw large vials of blood, waited for days to get the test back and then blanched at the bill for $1,500 for the tests? To add to its allure, the story had a missionary component to it, of a product that would change health care around the world by bringing cheap and speedy blood testing to the vast multitudes that cannot afford the status quo.

The mix of exuberance, passion and missionary zeal that animated the company comes through in this interview that Ms. Holmes gave Wired magazine before the dam broke a few weeks ago. As you read the interview, you can perhaps see why there was so little questioning and skepticism along the way. With a story this good and a heroine this likeable, would you want to be the Grinch raising mundane questions about whether the product actually works?

2. The Black Turtleneck: I must confess that the one aspect of this story that has always bothered me (and I am probably being petty) is the black turtleneck that has become Ms. Holmes’s uniform. She has boasted of having dozens of black turtlenecks in her closet and while there is mention that her original model for the outfit was Sharon Stone, and that Ms. Holmes does this because it saves her time, she has never tamped down the predictable comparisons that people made to Steve Jobs.

If a central ingredient of a credible narrative is authenticity, and I think it is, trying to dress like someone else (Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett or the Dalai Lama) undercuts that quality.

3. Governance matters (even at private businesses): I have always been surprised by the absence of attention paid to corporate governance at young, start ups and private businesses, but I have attributed that to two factors. One is that these businesses are often run by their founders, who have their wealth (both financial and human capital) vested in these businesses, and are therefore as less likely to act like “managers” do in publicly traded companies where there is separation of ownership and management.

The other is that the venture capitalists who invest in these firms often have a much more direct role to play in how they are run, and thus should be able to protectthemselves. Theranos illustrates the limitations of these built in governance mechanisms, with a board of directors in August 2015 had twelve members:

I apologize if I am hurting anyone’s feelings, but my first reaction as I was reading through the list was “Really? He is still alive?”, followed by the suspicion that Theranos was in the process of developing a biological weapon of some sort. This is a board that may have made sense (twenty years ago) for a defense contractor, but not for a company whose primary task is working through the FDA approval process and getting customers in the health care business. (Theranos does some work for the US Military, though like almost everything else about the company, the work is so secret that no one seems to know what it involves.)

The only two outside members that may have had the remotest link to the health care business were Bill Frist, a doctor and lead stockholder in Hospital Corporation of America, and William Foege, worthy for honor because of his role in eradicating small pox.

My cynical reaction is that if you were Ms. Holmes and wanted to create a board of directors that had little idea what you were doing as a business and had no interest in asking, you could not have done much better than this group of septuagenarians.

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2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I share your thought that the Bioweapons Lab might well have been formulating something heinous.

The blogsite Political Velcraft, is suggesting that the CIA may be in the process of being sacrificed....under the bus!In two days time 19th April, incidentally a Satanic Feast Day, China intends pegging the Yuan to ...GOLD.

HAARP may well be used to CREATE CHAOS as a distraction from the reintroduction of LAWFUL MONEY into the financial CYSTem.Some claim HAARP has been used to engineer earthquakes and tsunamis and, can be used to disrupt global communications systems. Japan has recently been "subjected" to a tectonic event. The Japanese Prime Minister has recently "declined" an Obama "request" to cancel an unofficial visit to Sotchi 6th May to meet with Vladimir Putin.

A speculative alternate etymology of Theranos, which is in line with the coinage of corporate names, is the catchy fusion of therapuein (Greek, to treat medically) and thanos (Greek, death). Not sure I want to see their logo.